


great labour's true-born knight

by goldfishtobleroneandamitie



Series: you're human, so am I [9]
Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: F/M, auto shop, but seriously can we talk about Feuilly's hands, hand obsession, mechanic!Feuilly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-29
Updated: 2013-05-29
Packaged: 2017-12-13 08:50:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/822384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfishtobleroneandamitie/pseuds/goldfishtobleroneandamitie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Feuilly is really good at his job, and Eponine loves his hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	great labour's true-born knight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [opabine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/opabine/gifts).



> May Heaven's choicest blessings fall  
> Upon that hero's head,  
> Who bravely toils throughout each day  
> To earn his loved ones bread.  
> You'll find no monarch who can show  
> A record half so grand.  
> God bless great labor's true-born knight--  
> The honest working man.  
> -Marie Joussaye, “Honest Working Man”

The auto shop where Feuilly works is a big one, holding twelve cars on a normal day. That means it’s loud, too; with mechanics yelling, metal clanging, and machinery grinding, hearing oneself _think_ is a challenge, let alone speaking or holding a conversation. Feuilly spends most of his days silent, sometimes with his iPod in, sometimes not, rather than adding to the din.

Therefore, he usually doesn’t notice the noise, because he has a focus that’s hyper-intense and, he’s been told, pretty intimidating. Most of the “problem” cars get handed off to him for just this reason—he’s able to focus enough on coughing alternators and hopelessly tangled wires to turn out repaired automobiles at twice the rate of any other mechanic. It’s earned him three raises in two years, and basically means he can work the hours he likes.

To be honest, however, he appreciates the loudness; it keeps up a background hum that’s more soothing than mere silence. It reminds him of doing homework to the soundtrack of six siblings, three dogs, and radio blaring Springsteen or Strait. The silence of his apartment, while often blessed after an Amis meeting or having to deal with a dissatisfied customer can sometimes get downright uncomfortable.

It used to be that Bahorel kept their shared space pleasantly noisome and then some, but Feuilly’s moved out since then for other reasons (mainly not wanting to get interrupted and catcalled when he’s with Eponine).

Now, though, since the other mechanics have gone home, the garage is quiet, and he’s got the volume on his iPod (an indulgence he’s careful to keep out of Enjolras’s sight) up too high to hear the pad of worn boots on the concrete floor. He’s singing along quietly, losing the tune as he focuses on a particularly stubborn bolt.

“In the parking lot the visionaries dress in the latest rage/Inside the backstreet girls are dancing, to the records that the DJ plays!” His voice cracks on the last note as the bolt abruptly twists, and unleashes a flurry of rust and worse. He pushes out from under the car, sputtering curses, and rolling to his feet he catches sight of an Arabian princess, brown skin and dark hair and ebony eyes. She’s standing with her hand on a cocked hip, one eyebrow raised, and biting her lip to keep from laughing.

“Hey, Ep,” he greets her dryly. “Something funny?” He shakes his head like a wet dog, shedding red metallic flakes all over the garage floor. _One of the grease monkeys will clean it._

“Bruce Springsteen? Really?”

“Hey,” he says defensively. “My dad’s from Jersey, and as such, the Boss is our God.” He scratches his scalp. “He never said that in front of my mom, though—he might have gotten dragged to Confession.”

She’s given up even attempting to suppress laughter at this point, and her teeth flash, stark against dark skin.

“…anyway , you’re early,” he continues.

“No, you’re late. It’s seven-thirty.” She taps her watch.

“Really? Shit, Ep, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. What’s wrong with the car?” she asks, gesturing at the revoltingly green monstrosity that’s responsible for the red all over the floor.

 _“Everything.”_ He nearly scrubs a hand across his face before remembering that it’s coated in oil and rust, and instead runs a hand across the hood of the car and pops it. “See that?”

“No,” she laughs, and moves closer.

“Right….there.” He has to reach across her to reach the part he’s pointing at. “See?”

She cranes her neck, pressing up against him to see a hunk of metal much like those around it, if a bit cleaner. “Sure?”

 _“That_ bit is rusted clean through and has been leaking oil. It’s not the only problem, but it _is_ the most immediately dangerous. The only oil this car takes, apparently, is really flammable,” he explains further. “Honestly, it’s a hazard anyway, but the man wants it fixed, even if it’ll end up costing more than the car’s worth.”

“He says, as he eats Ramen for a month to pay for a new alternator for his truck,” she laughs.

He shrugs. “People do crazy things for women, men especially. “

“Oh, so it’s a she?”

“All cars are shes. Hazard of male-dominated sailing and repair industries,” he shrugs.

She squints at the brand, smudged with dirt and oil as it is. “Where’s it from? I don’t recognize it.”

“Neither did I, which is a first.” He’s disgruntled about it, too—he likes to know things, and he especially likes to know things about the work he does. If he’s going to be a mechanic, he’s going to be a good one, dammit. To be honest, that niggling feeling of inadequacy is probably what lost him in his work; Feuilly likes puzzles, but only solvable ones, and this car is more of an explosion waiting to happen than a puzzle.

“So your boss passed it on to his best mechanic.” She leans farther over the engine. The miniskirt he’d barely clocked before (more fool him—anything that shows off Eponine’s excellent legs that well deserves its very own appreciation moment) rides up as she does, going from merely short to dangerous proportions. “So that thing, too?”

He’s startled from his staring by her question. “Yeah. I opened her up and realized, that, uh, the fuel lines were frayed.” He can feel the blush spread across his cheeks even more as she leans even further forward. There’s absolutely no way she doesn’t know what she’s doing, and the look she shoots him over her shoulder confirms his suspicions. “ _Christ,_ Eponine.”

“You have such good hands, she murmurs, straightening from her position over the car and the parts she has no interest in, and turns to face him. Lifting his right hand, she doesn’t flinch at the    dirt and oil that coats it.

He loves that about her, that she does not flinch. Eponine is a chameleon, the best there is at rolling with the punches. And in the boxing ring of life, she’s taken a few more shiners than most. She’s learned how to take them and come back swinging—she could probably teach even him something about scrappy fighting, even though he was a shy kid at an inner-city Boston school who learned to box to keep the bullies off. He has his scars too.

She’s tracing the physical ones now, forever-imprinted bruises and mats of calluses on the third knuckle, crossed with a long cut from a snapped fender across three joints—too big and too bulky to bandage, but still angry and red. Joly, if he saw it, might have a seizure. Eponine only brushes gentle fingers along it, clucking her tongue, and moves down.

Her hands are toughened, too, but differently from his. As she studies his hands, so he studies hers. A few places of thickened skin that have the look of fighting-calluses. Burns on the tips of her fingers from hot coffee, nails trimmed short against vanity, and a round, angry red scar that he’s recognized before—a cigarette burn—and lavished with affection accordingly. It’s one of his favorite places to kiss.

Fingertips worn hard and smooth from repetitive if not rough labor, save for the pencil-mark on the inside of one ring finger, trace down his hands, collecting a bit of grime as they go. She doesn’t seem to mind, though, as intently as she’s staring at his hands, so he remains silent.

“Your hands,” she murmurs again. “So strong, so capable, so _forceful_ as you talk. So protective in a fight over my honor,” she chuckles. (He’s still not sorry for that one, though it’d put him in the doghouse for nearly a week).

“Anyone would think they’d be rough, uncomfortable,” she continues. “But no. They’re gentle with Gavroche, gentle…gentle with me.” Her voice is playful now, and he’s getting whiplash from the shifts in the tone of the conversation.

“Except when I don’t want you to be,” she whispers, and the husky note to her tone is not doing him any favors.

“Eponine,” he says weakly, “we’re in public.”

“Really?” She laughs, but he can’t see the humor. Perhaps because her laugh is one of the single most arousing things he’s ever heard. “I don’t see anyone here, Gael. No one to see this.”

Her hands, small but strong (not that he could resist them, even so) pull him to her, and they drag up his chest to tangle in the short hairs at the nape of his neck, dragging him down to her. The hood of the car clangs shut as his hands, released, snake around her waist and into her own hair, bumping the metal in the process.

Eponine has been with her share of men and a decent number have been good, even excellent kissers. Montparnasse kissed her like he possessed her, Grantaire like she was a wild thing. She’d been thoroughly taken in by both approaches.

Feuilly, though…Feuilly kisses like it matters. Everything about his personality—fiery idealist by nature, considerate and methodical by habit—comes out in his kissing, so it’s as if every time is better than the one before. He remembers what works, what makes her toes curl, and tries something new to make it better. He nearly always manages exactly that.

He’s flipped her around by now, and she’s seated on the hood of the car, framed by his hands braced against the metal. She’s kissing him like she’s drunk, greedy and demanding, and he’s matching it by giving her everything and then some, then demanding something of his own. She’s tugging ineffectively at his shirt when a voice emerges from the front office.

“Feuilly! You’ll lock up?”

They jump apart like scared bunnies, Eponine rubbing her lips with a grin (he has to look away before lascivious thoughts drive him straight back to them), and Feuilly running a hand through his mussed hair (of which Eponine is both rather proud and quite proprietary of). His cheeks are flushed red.

“Y-yeah, John, I got it.”

He’s mock glaring at her, a look belied by the lopsided grin on his face, and she grins wider at him and waves. He just shakes his head, teeth a bright white flash against his crimson cheeks.

“All right, then. See ya tomorrow, man.”

“Yeah, see you tomorrow.”

He waits for the lights in the front office to go out before he addresses her. “You,” he accuses, “are a minx.”

“Proud of it, too,” she says smugly. “You hungry?”

“Which kind?” He crosses to her again, taking her face in his hands and kissing her grinning mouth.

“Well, either,” she replies, “but I meant real food. You didn’t eat lunch, did you?”

Now that she’s mentioned it, he can nearly hear his stomach growling. “Let’s eat.”

“Pizza?”

“You read my mind,” he laughs. “Carpe Horas?”

“Is there another pizza place?”

“Let me wash my hands.”

“I’ll be waiting,” she flirts.

She re-seats herself on the unidentified, rusty-bottomed car’s hood as she watches him disappear into the employee locker room, eyes fondly following his ass as it moves under faded-white denim. He needs new clothes, so does she—but Gavroche will start seventh grade next year, and he’s grown nearly two inches in the last four months, so they will have to wait. Feuilly has middle-school-age siblings of his own, so he, too, will wear his clothes to death before he replaces them.

Feuilly makes good money as a mechanic, better than most, and certainly enough to live in a nicer apartment in a safer neighborhood than he does. Instead, he lives like the broke college student he isn’t, eating Ramen as often as not (though more not, now that she cooks and Gavroche is over more), sleeping on a futon (she’d put her foot down on that one, and he’d obtained Combeferre’s old box-spring and frame), and wearing band T-shirts from high school (he still can get away with those, because they’re now just a bit tight and she loves watching his shoulders move underneath the worn fabric). He does all this so he can send a good third of his paycheck home to his mother every month—the money that he earns with his hands goes directly into another’s, to pay for children he’s had no control over or contact with in nearly two years.

It’s what had originally drawn her to him—not the sacrifice specifically, but that aura of competence, of simplicity, of unquestioning selflessness. It’s not obvious, like it is in Combeferre, with his button-ups and glasses and searching looks. Feuilly looks like he’s in a band—wild red hair, beat-up boots that look artsy but actually just are that old. The feeling he gives people is in spite of his looks, not because of it.

His hands show that, too. She hadn’t been lying when she’d said she loved his hands; they are a synecdoche, a microcosm of his personality stretched over bones and tendons. The scars of who he is, from fighting and working; the unexpected softness on the edges of his palms, contrasted with the broad calluses down the middle that will catch on her clothes when he touches her—these are the hands of a workingman, the hands of a blue-collar man who works hard to make a buck, as the Springsteen he likes so much would say.

But there are finer calluses too, pads from pens or paintbrushes that have created art that he thinks she doesn’t know about. Gavroche had found it first, tucked into a kitchen drawer full to the brim with full and empty sketchbooks. She hadn’t looked at any except the top one, and she’d been surprised and flattered upon realizing that most of the finished sketches are of her—headshots, full body, shoulders, how she looks cooking or studying or (she blushes at the memory) showering.

Most of it, however, had been crowded with sketches of hands. She’s heard Grantaire rant about them before, how they’re second only to noses as the hardest parts of the body to draw. Grantaire is not a realist painter in general, though, and it appears that Feuilly is. And he’s _good._ She can tell the _hands_ he has drawn apart—Enjolras’s, long and delicate; his own, pianist’s fingers but broad palms, an odd juxtaposition; Combeferre’s, big but perfectly proportioned; Grantaire’s, stubby but somehow graceful; and Bahorel’s, broad and thick and peppered with scars.

“You ready?” he asks, emerging from the locker room. He’s changed into one of his band T-shirts that rides up—in fact, it already has in back, boding well for the night—and his hands are wet, but the grime that coated them is gone, the flesh scrubbed pink and raw from the force needed to get them off.

He crosses to her and touches her face again, only to rub a thumb over her cheekbone. “I got you dirty.”

“I’ll never complain about that,” she sighs, leaning into his touch.

She can feel the weight of his gaze on her, slow and lingering, like she’s a spell he can’t—doesn’t want to—break. He coughs. “Pizza.”

“Then home?” she says, glancing up at him. He coughs again, louder this time, and she grins.

“Yes. Then home.”

Pleased, she interlaces his fingers with his. “Pizza.”

They walk out hand in hand, calluses touching and fitting and rubbing along comfortably—a perfect picture that Feuilly, perhaps, will reproduce one day. Behind them, the rusted-out car remains half-finished, having seen more in the last thirty minutes than in the first twenty years of its life.

Their hands stay intertwined until they are back at her apartment.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry, I just have a LOT of feelings about Feuilly. (And so does Eponine, apparently). If you'd like to wail with me about Feuilly, or Eponine, or Les Mis, or anything really, you can find me on Tumblr--it's the same URL as I have here :) I really hope you enjoyed this!
> 
> Either way, if you could drop me a line about what you did or didn't like, what works and what doesn't, I would be so grateful. I absolutely love this pairing and I want to do them justice, and I need all the help I can get.
> 
>  
> 
> -star


End file.
